Five Things That Never Happened
by marlinowl
Summary: How exactly does that which never was differ from that which will never be?
1. To Tigress

**Title: **Five Things That Never Happened To Tigress  
><strong>Characters:<strong> Tigress  
><strong>Summary:<strong> _Phantom tears for a phantom life, like a remnant of phantom things she once knew._

* * *

><p><em>i.<em>

She learns not to care so much some time after his last visit, or she tries not to, at least.

From her room, Tigress can hear the other children talking excitedly in the hallway. Someone else is celebrating their last hour at the orphanage today; she thinks that it's Guo Rong, the small hare who was always sneaking into the kitchen for an illegal helping of carrot cake. She won't miss him too badly – she doesn't like the way he slides comfortably into discussions which don't necessarily concern him. Come to think of it, she never did completely forgive him for that one time he knocked over her dominoes when she was halfway through and didn't have the common courtesy to offer an apology. To some degree, she did, but only because of what she thinks Shifu might have said about her temper.

She still keeps the carved tiles even though it's been years since he last came, but it gets harder every day. For a while, it was nice to feel that someone besides the matronly goat caretaker possessed some shred of concern for her. It was nice that they could sit in this stone chamber and play this trivial game and pretend that it actually mattered. It was nice, but she found out quickly that it couldn't make her a part of anyone's ideal family, couldn't make her _wanted_. In the months following his lessons she had thought that this illusion of discipline and control would be enough to make her belong, somehow.

Tigress lies on her bed, flipping a single domino dextrously, rolling it this way and that. Outside, Guo Rong departs with his new parents, waving goodbye. He cries jubilantly, a beautiful chord. Palming the wooden piece, she crushes it into dust and lets the fine powder sift through her fingers.

_ii._

As far as logic goes, it would stand to reason that if the Dragon Warrior were to meet with an unfortunate event which culminated in him losing his life, then Grand Master Oogway would have to pick another one, the real one. In the dark of night and the confusion, it would appear to be an accident. Everyone would think that he just tried to escape and went a little too fast leaving the Jade Palace. It isn't about the glory and honour anymore; Tigress knows that this is the only way to set things right again.

However, living things are never completely rational, as she will discover, and even well-devised plans fall apart every now and then.

His shoulders hit the steps hard, and the audible crunch of bone against solid stone is much louder than she expected. Something shifts behind her; she turns around in time for Shifu to dash brusquely past her. He examines the panda lying supine on the ground and when he is unable to find a pulse, he slumps backwards, quivering.

"What did you do?" The syllables are ground through gritted teeth, coloured with anger. He stays kneeled next to what used to be the Dragon Warrior, unyielding and rigid, refusing to look at his disgraced student.

Tigress hopes that he will understand one day, and knows that he will thank her for this, eventually. "What needed to be done," she answers softly, and she lets herself believe it.

_iii._

This recklessness defies all sanity and lucidity. Self-preservation screams at her at every step to turn around and flee, and she bites down on it to quash it. She knows that there isn't any chance – she learned this twice: Once from the battle on the bridge and once from the hopeless resignation on Shifu's face as he bid them farewell. Tigress supposes that this is the sole thing that she managed to gleam from Po; it appears that some of his foolhardiness has rubbed off onto her.

She hates and thanks him for it.

She strides through the doors, which have already been flung open. Shifu mouths at her to run. Tigress stares down the snow leopard and assumes a fighting stance, her second – and final – transgression.

Later, in the split second before she leaves, she acknowledges that this is how a warrior dies with honour: A sole pressing against her ribs, eyelids growing heavy, and claws raking the air, all far, far away.

_iv._

One day when she's cleaning the china plates, she stops for a moment and considers that maybe they aren't ready for this.

Granted, it had been his idea to run and his silly charts and annotated maps, but she was the one who went along with it. It seemed like such an adventure at the time – if only she had known exactly how the idea would dissolve so easily when exposed to the reality of living a life that wasn't meant for her. Sure, they weren't allowed to marry in the Valley of Peace, but was there really anything wrong with just being the Dragon Warrior and one of the Furious Five?

However, she can't deny that they're relatively satisfied in their new life. They have what they always envisioned – a home in a municipal wing, the menial normalities of civilians, their unbridled love for each other…

And yet, Tigress can't convince herself that she's fully content, wondering if maybe Po is the one who has satisfaction large enough for the both of them. It's difficult not to look back at what she left behind, at _who_ she left behind. She thinks that Po knows, but he never said anything after he found the chunk of wood she broke in her first demonstration to him under their bed. The topic hangs over dinner every other night like a presence and they just eat, neither of them willing to broach it, to present it.

In the end, she chalks it all down to love. She loves him and he loves her, and that is all that's crucial. What she wants is immaterial, because this is what he wants and when you really look at it closely there really is no difference, is there?

_Is there?_

_v._

The last time Tigress remembers crying is when Shifu summoned the six of them to his bedside that winter evening. It was snowing, and the darkness of night had just touched the mountain top.

He didn't have much time left, just barely enough for uttered goodbyes. For the first time, Tigress wasn't afraid to wear her heart on her sleeve, so she wept openly when he spoke to her.

"Oh, Tigress," he had murmured. "Let's have none of that now, child."

Since that day, she never cries much anymore. She didn't cry at the funeral when they lowered his casket into the earth and covered it up with soil, thinking that would have been what he wanted. She didn't shed a single tear the day a mysterious fire razed the Jade Palace to its foundations, circumscribing the umbra of a fiery eclipse into the hillside. Her eyes even remained dry when she woke to an existence that couldn't possibly be hers – the last remaining member of the Furious Five. Po would have been enamoured by her monolithic display of fortitude; he had called her hardcore, after all, and this would only serve to solidify that perception.

She doesn't remember crying, but she knows that she does, for every morning when she opens her eyes there's the immediate sensation of brine stinging her ears. In the breadth of night tears have flowed in lateral – and opposite – directions. The dried salt marks out this unchosen path of hers; this solitude of days; the quietude of loneliness. Phantom tears for a phantom life, like a remnant of phantom things she once knew.

If not where she is unable to, then where the impossible isn't.

(Sometimes she awakens as it is happening, disturbed from sleep by the sheer volume of cold suspended in so much night.)

* * *

><p><strong>AN****: **Feedback is always welcome.

Many thanks to reader RasetsuRyu for leaving a review advising a few corrections in my fic. The errors have been rectified.


	2. To Viper

**Title: **Five Things That Never Happened To Viper  
><strong>Characters:<strong> Viper  
><strong>Summary:<strong> _"My father used to tell me at night when I was little," she murmurs, "that rain would make the flowers grow."_

* * *

><p><em>i.<em>

The full rush of patrol duty kicks in a couple of weeks after her father has shown her the ropes – navigating the caliginous streets at night, picking vagrants out of the concealed alcoves and crevices scattered across the village, all the while doing this with poison-laden fangs glinting evilly in the moonlight, and the finesse and poise only attributable to the village chief's daughter.

Lately it has become a running joke around town in recent years how it would be a lot less safe if her parents had borne a son instead of her. She would corkscrew him into the ground and then some, they would say, laughing because they know it's true. Viper the Death, Viper the Mortiferous, Viper the Valiant, Viper of the Nethertoxin; the names accumulate with every triumph until she has one for every day of the week. Even considering how Grand Master Viper had turned out, it's difficult for anyone to imagine a male snake matching up to her, though sometimes they have their wild speculations involving hundred-foot serpents that spit fire and acid. Then she pretends not to hear if she is within earshot, part of her thinking it all hyperbole and the other part senselessly proud for herself and her father.

But there is no denying that they are indeed strong together. Save for that one gorilla marauder with anti-venom armour and a couple of mithridate-guzzling knuckleheads, their fights usually conclude within ten minutes, fifteen tops and only when they're outnumbered five-to-one or more. Their little village becomes off-limits, skewered on bandit maps by a pair of snakes and an adjoining skull. No one is foolhardy enough to attempt encroaching on the territory any further, and those who do are allowed to return in time to jabber out a warning before collapsing dead, and always, always sporting twin puncture marks somewhere on their person.

It doesn't come as much of a surprise when a messenger goose arrives one day from the Valley of Peace, extending an invitation for her to join what Master Shifu of the Jade Palace dubbed 'The Furious Five', potentially the strongest Kung Fu warrior squad in recorded history. Viper turns down the offer politely after a day of consideration, sending the messenger back with her well-wishes for the team to be a successful one. The call of duty to protect China is a strong one, but eventually she decides that the call of duty to her father and her home comes first and foremost. Viper certainly can't imagine living any other life besides that, or any life far away from the people she has sworn to protect on her life, and her fangs.

_ii._

If it were a sick joke, she would know – years of living next door to Mantis does that to a person.

There's no joke about it. It's just sick. Nightmarishly so.

The odds hadn't been stacked in her favour a couple of mornings ago when Grand Master Oogway had assembled them to select the Dragon Warrior. Close to everyone in town had shown up for the landmark event, and there was even a diplomat representing the Emperor all the way from Peking to relay the news once the ceremony had concluded. Aside from one anomalous moment during their demonstrations where a panda had catapulted into the crowd as if launched by a trebuchet from behind the gates and floored a pig, everything went according to schedule. And it wasn't even a certainty that Tai Lung would've come back; Oogway had his visions and they had their scepticisms, plus Master Shifu arranged for precautionary measures to be taken just for that.

Oogway chose her. He chose Viper, and she had bowed her head to the celebratory roar of spectators. It wasn't unexpected and yet she hadn't been entirely hopeful; her peers had equally fair chances, perhaps a little bit more for Tigress and Crane, but otherwise it was a decent decision. Everyone respected the results, knowing unequivocally that she had the potential to be worthy of the title and power.

Grand Master Oogway's gone a day and night later, and then came Zeng.

They hadn't wasted any time dallying about or debating if she was ready or not. Master Shifu rallied them up and called down the Dragon Scroll. Viper stood before him, accepting the artifact with a shaking tail.

A shell of an artifact that now lies in the corner of her room, void of any power or meaning. Useless. Empty and useless.

Useless, useless, useless, just like her.

With or without the Dragon Scroll, her destiny is absolute and hers solely to face. As soon as the alarm sounds from the village gates, she stands at the peak of the valley and looks ahead to the oncoming storm with the moribund calm of one about to be executed, steeling herself in preparation as the wind howls and wallops her face.

He appears on the far end of the horizon, and bares his teeth in a dreadful snarl.

_iii._

During the first year anniversary, she refuses to attend, as is the case with the second and the third. Every time she reappears from absence the following day it means another lecture from her mother, another round of force-fed guilt that sours her insides and brings timeless tears to the surface like monsters through a closet. Viper gives up trying to evade talking about it with her mother despite the fact that whenever she looks into her mother's eyes, sees her pained expression, the rupture within her blows wide open, and all the guilt and sorrow of years past come back in a massive deluge, threatening to drown her until she turns tail and flees.

She never heals, but she tries her best to forget the unforgettable.

"You can't keep running away, Viper," her mother says one night.

She takes it as a direct challenge. "Seems like the only thing I can do right. Watch me," Viper mutters.

"You were _ten_, Viper. We've all let it go, except for you. He'd want you to be there. You know that."

"I don't know anything. And neither do you."

Her mother flinches at the retort and the conversation ends there and then, like it always does the night after, year on year.

.

On the fifth anniversary, Viper stops running.

She follows her mother out of the village and over the verdant hills. They come to stop in a large sun-blasted glade, and right in the middle is a large stone surrounded by nodding azaleas. The base of the stone is green with a fine lamina of crenulated lichen, but the monument is otherwise onyx black and perfectly plain, carved sufficiently large enough to cover a snake's body. Grand Master Viper's body.

Sedge tickles her scales as they approach it. Her mother is wearing the widow's veil she'd spun out of white silk, blood and tears woven right into the fabric. Viper starts to wish that she'd dressed up as well, even though there'd be no one at the end of it all to sweep her up on the end of his tail and smile and kiss her on the forehead and tell her how gorgeous she looked.

Looking up at the wordless memorial, a terrible feeling grips her. "I'm sorry," she whispers, growing frantic, tears burning her eyes. She needs to get far away, as far as possible. Her reaction turns visceral, carnal, even. "I can't do this. I can't."

She turns and runs and never looks back.

The next few days are quieter than usual. In the coming weeks, she's rarely home.

The next year, she leaves the village and becomes another person someplace else. Her mother grieves for the loss of two.

_iv._

It is spring, and the day is beautiful outside, but she doesn't get to see much of it in bed.

(Every day outside is beautiful, when she's inside.)

She's now in the village infirmary after a bout of coughing fits that had left her breathless and nearly catatonic a week prior. The foot of her bed is a mound of discarded cloths, on each one a fine mist of blood where she had held them against her mouth whenever an episode had seized her. At the very least, she's not contagious as far as the doctors are concerned, and her friends come down from the Jade Palace often to visit. The word is that her parents are also on the way, but it's a month's journey, and no one knows if she will last that long.

Everyone plays their role. Mantis and Monkey both make her laugh with their little quibbles and choreographed banter while Crane recites whatever poetry he's written, and Tigress keeps by her bedside whenever she can to talk about the days they've had following Viper's admission and indulge in their private girl-to-girl moments that only they can have. Master Shifu appears sporadically, but she understands the duties of a Grand Master and appreciates the gesture nonetheless.

Po is, well, Po. He brings piping hot congee with a smiley face sauced onto it and get-well soups that have turnip chunks arranged into Chinese characters, elucidating the message in a manner she finds adorable. Viper sees him the most and at times she wonders if he sneaks out to make unauthorised calls on her. In fact, she becomes certain of that hypothesis after one time when his entrance involves squeezing through the window, and Master Shifu asks rather candidly the next day if she'd seen him around their training brackets, eyes stern as if to ferret out a falsehood.

She doesn't say anything, though, and holds back a grin.

"Honestly, guys; I'm alright," she murmurs every time they come down, speaking as normally as she can with her throat wracked raw, shredding her voice into something ragged and almost unrecognisable. "There really isn't any need – I feel fine." The lie usually gets them to leave, albeit sceptically, but sometimes she forces herself to complete the farce with a mock display of wellness when they insist on staying behind.

One day, it's raining lightly in the late afternoon. Po's with her again on yet another unsanctioned visit, urgently telling her about the new sizzling vegetable place that's opened in town. "Once you're better, we'll take you there, 'kay?" he offers hastily; the visit is planned to be succinct so as to skirt detection, and his eyes flicker towards the exit. "I gotta go. I'll be back to see you again as soon as possible."

Viper's eyelids flutter and she gives a tristful smile. "Po," she whispers beseechingly. "Stay with me? Please?"

He pauses. "I'm cutting it a little fine –"

"Just until the rain ends."

Po looks down at her, feeling her tail snake weakly around his trembling wrist. Sweet, sweet Viper. "All right then," he replies softly, taking his place by her side.

The room goes still, and for a while the only sound is the thin patter of rain outside. Viper shuts her eyes tiredly and leans back in a faint, her breaths growing thready. "My father used to tell me at night when I was little," she murmurs, "that rain would make the flowers grow." Po squeezes her tail gently and nods for her, even though she's already asleep and can't see.

Soon after she stops speaking, all is quiet; the rain ceases at nearly the exact moment when Viper's tiny reptilian heart gives out and her last breath billows past her lips, untempered and sacrosanct as a prayer uttered at a tabernacle.

_v._

"What do you think," Grand Master Viper asks, "about lotus flowers?"

Madam Viper, heavily pregnant and cantankerous from the stuffy aftermath of morning sickness, snorts disagreeably. "What makes you think it's a girl? Anyway, too watery. Can't you choose something more unisex and less –" she wavers for a couple of seconds, struggling to find the exact word. "– flowery?" She did try her best.

Immediately, he nixes the suggestion for a nice combination of nasturtiums and rhododendrons. "I'll see what I can do tomorrow," he says, leaning over to snuggle against her swollen abdomen. For this, both can smile in eager anticipation of their firstborn, the village's future hope.

.

There's much rejoicing about the people a day later when the village chief announces the auspicious arrival of his child: A healthy, fanged baby boy named Viper.

* * *

><p><strong>AN: **Feedback? It would be lovely.

Not starting a new series; this is probably the last time I'll do this. I blame _cofax_. _"The rain will make the flowers grow" _is more Les Misérables sneaking in. And yes, most members of the taxonomic family _Viperidae_ give birth to their offspring.


End file.
